Summarizing is the biggest skill on the exam, 25–35% of your score: you must report what a Latin passage says (its people, setting and sequence of events) and what it implies. This chapter shows how to build a summary, then gives the content of every required reading of Pliny and Vergil, in order, so you recognize each passage when you see it.
- explicit meaning
- What a Latin text states outright: the people, the setting, the actions and their order, and the ideas it expresses. SUM-1 questions ask for it.
- Example: Mater in atrio filiam exspectat (A mother waits for her daughter in the atrium): who, what and where are all stated.
- Letter 6.16.1–3: Tacitus's request
- Tacitus has asked how Pliny's uncle died. Pliny thanks him: Tacitus's writing will give the death undying glory; his uncle, who did and wrote memorable things, will be most blessed.
- Example: Quo libentius suscipio, deposco etiam quod iniungis (§3: So I take on all the more gladly, and even demand, the task you set).
- Letter 6.20.1–5: tremors at Misenum
- Tacitus asks about Pliny's own ordeal. At Misenum, strong tremors send his mother rushing in. In the courtyard Pliny, in his eighteenth year, reads Livy; his uncle's friend scolds them.
- Example: posco librum Titi Livi (§5: I ask for a book of Titus Livy)
- Letter 7.27.1–3: Curtius Rufus and Africa
- Pliny asks Sura if ghosts are real or born of fear. In Africa, a superhuman woman, Africa herself, foretold the still-unknown Curtius Rufus's career and death there. All came true.
- Example: Facta sunt omnia (§3: Everything came to pass)
- Letter 10.5: citizenship for Harpocras
- A doctor, Harpocras, treated Pliny's near-fatal illness last year. To repay him, Pliny asks Trajan to make this foreign freedman a Roman citizen, and asks a favor for two freedwomen.
- Example: Pliny later recalls writing only esse eum a peregrina manumissum (10.6.2: that he had been freed by a foreign woman).
- Aeneid 1.1–11: the opening
- Vergil sings of a man exiled by fate who, through Juno's anger, suffered on land, sea and in war to found a city in Italy. He asks the Muse why.
- Example: Tantaene animis caelestibus irae? (1.11: Do heavenly minds have such great anger?)
- Aeneid 4.74–89: Dido in love
- Dido shows Aeneas her city, begs to hear his Trojan story again, and at night lies alone where he reclined, or holds his son. Building and training in Carthage stop.
- Example: gremio Ascanium genitoris imagine capta / detinet (4.84–85: captivated by his father's likeness, she holds Ascanius in her lap)
- Aeneid 6.450–476: Dido's shade
- In the underworld Aeneas meets Dido, newly dead. Weeping, he swears he left her unwillingly, by the gods' orders. Unmoved as stone, she flees to her former husband, Sychaeus.
- Example: illa solo fixos oculos aversa tenebat (6.469: She, turned away, kept her eyes fixed on the ground)
- Aeneid 11.532–594: the story of Camilla
- Diana tells Opis how exiled Metabus tied baby Camilla to a spear, vowed her to Diana and threw her over a flooding river. Opis must avenge any wound to her.
- Example: infelix fugit in iaculo stridente Camilla (11.563: Unlucky Camilla flies on the whistling javelin)
- implied meaning
- What a text suggests without saying it, worked out from figurative language or from details that point to a conclusion. SUM-2 questions ask for it.
- Example: Senex epistulam legit et statim flet (An old man reads a letter and at once weeps): implied, its news moves him deeply.
- Letter 6.16.4–6: the cloud over Vesuvius
- At Misenum, where the uncle commands the fleet, Pliny's mother points out a huge, strange cloud rising from a mountain (later found to be Vesuvius), shaped like a pine.
- Example: non alia magis arbor quam pinus expresserit (§5: no other tree would have shown its shape better than a pine)
- Letter 6.20.6–10: leaving town
- At dawn, as buildings sway, they leave town with a panicked crowd. Carts slide, the sea retreats, flames split a black cloud. They won't flee without knowing the uncle's fate.
- Example: mare in se resorberi ... videbamus (§9: we saw the sea sucked back into itself)
